Visions Capitales, translated into English as
The Severed Head, was written to accompany an exhibit
that Kristeva curated at the Louvre in 1998. It explores various
representations of skulls, decapitation, and severed heads in the
history of art starting with ancient sculpture and moving through
contemporary art, including Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe Diptych.
Most generally, her thesis is that representations of skulls and
severed heads both evoke and sublimate our fear of death,
particularly as it is related to the maternal body.

In the introductory chapter, Kristeva maintains that mourning,
particularly mourning the loss of the mother, specifically her
face, motivates the symbolic representation of the head. In a
sense, the separated head always brings us back to the first
separation, the infant's separation from the mother. In the next
chapter, she analyzes the cult of the skull insofar as it conjures
not only the head as the representative of living thought, but also
the face of the mother as representative of the fecund woman. She
concludes that the interior space of thought is created through the
representation of the invisible realm (thought and death
represented by the head) within the realm of the visible.

In the third chapter, Kristeva continues with the association
between feminity and beheading, discussing images of Medusa as
representations of the fear of the castrated and castrating
maternal sex. She points out that Medusa also represents the
necessity of representation itself insofar as we cannot confront
her severed head face-to-face, but only via reflections or
representations.

In the fourth chapter, drawing a fascinating connection between
Jesus, the feminine, and Medusa, she analyzes how iconography
transfers the invisible into the realm of the visible through the
fixed economy of icons. The next chapter is one of the most
interesting because Kristeva develops her argument that
representations of detached heads are central to the history, and
even the possibility, of representation. She maintains that the
floating head of Christ is decisive in modern representation
insofar as it brings the head together with the materiality of the
shroud. She argues that detaching and cutting are indispensable to
the economy of the inscription of the divine, which becomes flesh
or material through its association with the feminine/maternal. In
the sixth chapter, Kristeva links the prophet of Christ, John the
Baptist, and Christ himself along with their mothers, Mary and
Elizabeth. Using this association, she argues that decapitation is
a figure of the passage from suffering to serenity that prefigures
the peace promised by a new religion, Christianity. She discusses
Christianity as an example of the transubstantiation enabled by
representation itself, what she also calls alchemy, that turns our
suffering and loss, along with violent drives, into sublimatory
represenations and art.

In the seventh chapter, "Detachments," Kristeva continues her
argument that representations of decapitation both signal and
sublimate our fears and desires in relation to castration and
death. Taking up figures of women as decapitators who represent and
sublimate the fear of the all powerful castrating mother, eg.,
Judith, Dalila, Salomé, she proposes that these figures represent
two simultaneous anxieties: 1.) the anxiety over losing the mother
and its flip side, the anxiety over the all powerful mother 2.)
castration anxiety and its flip side, the anxiety over the
castrated woman's sex. She concludes that the repression most
difficult to admit in the representations of decapitations of all
sorts is the mother's face: the capital vision is the mother's
head. Again she reiterates that the cut or detachment is a
structural essential of religion—i.e., the separation from God.

In the eighth chapter, "From the guillotine to the abolition of
the pain of death," she analyzes images of beheadings from the
French Revolution. She continues what has been one of the most
provocative themes throughout the book, namely that representations
of violence can prevent real violence. She ends the chapter by
paraphrasing Lacan: what is effaced in the imaginary and the
symbolic risks returning at the level of the real. She concludes
that perhaps the figures of decapitation and severed heads can be
seen as an intimate form of resistance to the "democracy" of the
guillotine. She says, "Above all, if...

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